Goodbye, Ping. We Hardly Use Ye

And just like that, Apple gives Ping its expiration date. The message cropped up in the iTunes 10.7 update that went live today immediately after the iPhone 5 event. Barely two years old, Ping will no longer be available as of September 30 and it is no longer accepting new members.

With Facebook integration making a huge play in iTunes 11 and iOS 6, it seemed unlikely that Ping would have much of a future left, anyway. Users will be able to "like" songs and share what they're listening regardless. Though there are 100 million iTunes users, and Ping surpassed 1 million active users in 2010, there is no known count of how many users are currently active on the social network. But, judging from our own experiences, Ping was barely the social network we considered important enough to keep up with.

Ironically, awhile back we posited that one of the things Apple needed to do to give Ping its shot at glory is to fix its Facebook integration. Well, looks like Apple fixed it and nixed the bloat in the process.